Shut in for years exploring the material capacities of complex handmade instruments, could an artist emerge to compose unlabored, wide-open, epic and instinctive music? Two such genius-naifs, Liz Allbee and Hans Grüsel, deliver back-to-back marvels on this split release. Impossible instruments blow the lines off your conceptual map. Wonder at how the sounds were crafted, lean in to listen then list further, plunging to the immeasurable depths they open inside you.

Hans Grüsel’s “Zuckerkrieg (Part I)” steers electrons through a skein of patch cord in and around concreted pianos, horns, winds, violins and found objects, bending them into a composition that weighs a single stuttering heartbeat before it swells, bursts, and inundates the full range of human hearing.

Limited to 250 copies, the album was brought to Xopher Davidson for premastering and Paul Gold for vinyl mastering. It comes packaged in a frame-able poster and a digital download is included.

Liz Allbee/Hans Grüsel Also Appears On...

Liz Allbee's second full length solo unwinds a cozily misanthropic sonic cloth with hidden barbs sure to draw blood. Each track treads further into unnerving terrain: sonar-pings dizzy the ears, unknown nursery rhymes warble from an abandoned tongue, and a blur of wings beating in phase consumes all perception until a flat drum summons resplendent horns. Allbee's balance of melody and madness is not to be missed.

Fasten yourself to a thread, but dare to step inside "Theseus vs." Limited edition of 350, packaged in a handmade silk screened box.

Four minds writhe in poisonous hisses then align, feather, and float across a cathedral, water dripping audibly from its ceiling, transforming the space to wild banshee dionysian proportions counterpointed with sounds austere and mechanical. Kenta Nagai raises a Shamisan, Hichiriki and his throat together with the far voice and violoncello of Audrey Chen as Miya Masaoka conjures Koto with electronics and Hans Grüsel, rummaging in a suitcase of blippoo box and bugbrand weevil08, douses for… then detonates waveforms. If at first you perceived four directions, find yourself now surrounded in one.

-- SOLD OUT --
Warm, fuzzy, rabid in the way a soft muzzle tickles your neck then turns frenetic with the nibbling insistence of long teeth beneath lippy velvet. No one conjures sanguine madness like Liz Allbee on this her long-anticipated solo release.

One side is titled “Outside Inside” the other “Inside Inside”. Drawn from recordings at Marin Headlands Center for the Arts, it includes two entire takes of a single mental composition overlaid to reveal how timing/structure speaks to itself.

The edition is limited by the number of keys on a piano once the instrument has been nibbled apart into pairs of hammers between which are nestled spools of magnetic tape, soft, shiny, ready to slip like warm marrow into your palm.

Stare too long at Moog-master candymaker Hans Grüsel (his moustache a pair of clockhands!) and your seconds could be up. Return a smile from Gretel, you'll end up in a grin that never fades! Safer to listen from here as the Kränkenkabinet chugs away, spawning a trap door here, slamming a finger there, daring consciousness to believe the clarity of a thousand simultaneous sound crevices. Here appears an unnatural "Blue Blooded Door" to the infernal heart of the contraption, handcarved with all new compositions including “Sturm and Drang [at sea]" plus Grüsel’s live accompaniment to Dallas Bower’s film Alice in Wonderland. Artwork by Loachfillet in his hall of all wood mirrors!

--SOLD OUT-- Liz Allbee plucks out her eyes and sings through both sockets in this dizzying debut of blown bits, amputated dances, and miscreant sound. Connecting the conch shell to the microprocessor to the little finger dipped in the alternating current, Allbee summons a mutant orchestral spread of plangent electronics, horn holes, and unnerving vocals. The release that launched a label.